Uraina Clark
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Psychology
African Americans face higher rates of serious harm from alcohol, such as liver cirrhosis and death, yet researchers know little about how social pressures translate into drinking behavior. One such pressure is stereotype threat: when cues in a setting bring up a negative stereotype about a person's group, the resulting stress can change how they think and act.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
stereotype threat
impulsivity
alcohol use disorder
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Identify brain changes linked to stereotype threat-induced impulsivity by scanning 280 adults who drink regularly with fMRI while they complete an impulsivity task before and after exposure.
- Test the separate and combined effects of a spoken stereotype prompt, stereotype-related images and alcohol-related images on brain systems for impulsive decision-making, using a 2x2x2 between-subjects design.
- Determine whether stereotype threat-driven shifts in impulsivity and in emotion and self-control brain regions relate to participants' alcohol use behaviors.
More about the research
The team has shown that exposing African Americans to the stereotype of heavy alcohol and drug use raises impulsivity, acting without weighing consequences, and that this rise tracks with alcohol use. Impulsivity is a known pathway toward alcohol use disorder (AUD).
Why it matters
The findings could help explain why alcohol harms fall more heavily on African Americans and identify brain systems linked to stress-driven alcohol misuse. These systems could become targets for prevention and treatment strategies that build resilience and reduce alcohol misuse in adults.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cecilia Hinojosa
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience·Early-career
Define sex differences in reward-related brain circuitry, including the striatum, that relate to alcohol craving and drinking in trauma-exposed women and men, using functional neuroimaging.
William Mellick
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether parents with alcohol use disorder plus bipolar disorder and their unaffected teens show stronger brain responses to reward than AUD-only families, using fMRI during social reward and decision-making tasks.
Ligia Antezana
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether behavioral markers of compulsivity during decision-making are associated with nonsuicidal self-injury in 90 autistic adults, using self-reports, clinical interviews and a decision-making task.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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